Royal Holloway Campus

Thursday, February 6, 20143 years ago,

Royal Holloway, University of London has asked MWR to come and share some of our recent research with their Computing Society.

Dave Hartley and Jahmel Harris will be presenting their research on the 6th February 2014. Unfortunately these presentations are only open to University students but there’s more information on the specific topics below and if you’d like to find out more get in touch.

As mobile devices become more relevant, developers are trying to utilize existing skills to develop cross platform applications. Web technologies are the obvious candidate as the low barrier to entry to create HTML and JavaScript applications, coupled with the familiarity of these technologies with developers decreases development time. The ubiquity of HTML makes Write-Once-Run-Anywhere almost a reality. What could go wrong?

In this talk, Jahmel will discuss some of the security issues involved in bridging native and mobile technologies and look at PhoneGap, one of the most popular mobile frameworks for creating hybrid native /web applications.

“Native Bridges Over Troubled Water” by Dave Hartley

You don’t get something for nothing. Everything costs something, and anything that appears to be free must be deceptive. A pessimistic view or a proverb to live by? An overwhelming majority of smartphone users resist paying for apps. Coffee and hipster jeans are expensive, developers need to earn a living and as such they need to find alternative monetisation strategies. A lot of developers are experimenting with monetising through ads. And it’s not a bad idea – mobile advertising revenue (for the U.S.) was $31 billion in 2011 and $36 billion in 2012 (source: Interactive Advertising Bureau).

Based on research conducted by MWR, you’re actually paying for these ‘free’ apps. You may be handling over your address book, giving away the contents of your SMS’s, allowing someone to read your emails, or in some cases giving away full control of your device. In the very worst case, all of these things!

In this talk Dave will present findings from research conducted against several popular / common mobile advertising networks with a focus on how the identified issues can be exploited cross platform (Windows Phone, Android, Blackberry and iOS) for nefarious purposes.

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